My late mother was half German and half Welsh, having arrived on earth with the birth name of Richards. My father was Dutch, both of his parents having immigrated to the U.S. in 1911. Yet I had always wondered if, in my mother’s lineage that included John Howland, who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower, there might be a bit of Native American or First Nations blood running through my veins. I wondered if there would be a way that I might find out. Then I saw a program on TV about the National Geographic Genome Project. All one had to do was fork over $200 and send for a kit in which one swabbed one’s cheeks and mailed in the results. Last April, after a number of false starts—several swabbings were inadequate and NG mailed me a new kit each time, or they revamped it altogether so that one tested for both sides of the family—I received my results. Simply, the document showed that my deep DNA fell out like this: I was 41% Germanic, 41% Mediterranean, and 17% Southwest Asian. In some ways I was not surprised, given what I knew about my family: the Danes, to whom my aunt had traced my maternal grandfather’s ancestors; my maternal grandmother’s parents who immigrated from Germany in the nineteenth century; paternal grandparents who came over from Holland in 1911. But what about the 17% Southwest Asian? Well, in examining the map [find download below this paragraph], I saw that my father’s people had tromped through that area ages ago and mingled long enough to acquire a bit of that particular DNA. It may explain some things about my family and me, but I'm not at liberty to say what those might be.

Why do I write of this? I’m not sure. I've always been curious about my family, but I’d love to learn more. I know, for example, that the Jespers family’s whereabouts can be tracked back to the same few towns in Holland in the 1700s, as recently traced by one of my cousins. And as I said, my aunt, on the other side, traced the Richards family to the 1600s. Where were we before that? All the fathers and grandfathers I’ve had? All the mothers and grandmothers? To think that my traits, adorable and infuriating as they are to those who love me, are owed almost entirely to this large family of people I never knew and never shall. Will the next generation leave behind more clues than our ancestors did?